Learning to (Re)Love Tom Cruise

There’s a scene in 2011’s “Ghost Protocol,” the most recent installment of the “Mission Impossible” franchise, in which Tom Cruise hangs from the side of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. He’s wearing special “Mission Impossible”-style magnetic gloves that allow him to stick to the building with his hands — if the gloves work properly! And Jeremy Renner has already warned him that if he doesn’t break into the server on the 130th floor soon, they’ll never be able to do, I don’t know, something important. (I have a hard time following the plots of action movies.)

The scene is riveting — some of it because, I mean, will those gloves even work? And some of it because, naturally, that building. But mostly because, in the last 10 years, our culture has become completely reliant on computer-generated graphics and postproduction fixes, and yet here is a vision of effort being exerted by the person who was paid to exert it. That’s what had me so slack-jawed and tense: Tom Cruise was really doing it. He was really hanging off the building. Our Tom Cruise was really and truly hanging off the tallest building in the world.

There’s a making-of promotional video that I later found on YouTube that features this same scene. In it, the director and crew sit comfortably watching while Cruise stands inside the building, attached to some sort of safety harness, then runs and jumps out an open window, high up, or at least high enough up, and then runs down the side of the building. Him. Tom Cruise. Not a burly guy who looks enough like him that if he slapped on a wig and got shot at the right angles, we would be able to plausibly pretend it was Cruise. It was Cruise. And the feat is no less impressive — in fact, it’s more impressive — for seeing how it all works. It’s Cruise, dangling from that cord, working hard to get it right.

The unconscious is expert at detecting exactness, which is why this scene seems so much more thrilling than a thousand scenes cooked up in a hard drive. This is something Cruise and his team (and his insurers, apparently) understand. Something else that Cruise seems to understand is that there is no substitute for a man actually doing the thing he purports to be doing. And there may be no man who continues to fully comprehend that in exchange for his true sweat, we will love him, more than Tom Cruise does.

Who has ever worked so hard for our pleasure? Cruise’s brand as a late-career action hero isn’t Bruce Willis’s putout amusement or Matt Damon’s stoic efficiency or the Rock’s eyebrow-acting. There are no catchphrases in the Tom Cruise oeuvre. Instead, his trademark is just a preternaturally good-looking man trying to get things done — to run across the building in time; get to the virtual-reality arcade in time; take down that MIG in time. In his effects-heavy action films like “Minority Report” or the Missions Impossible or the in- theaters-now “Oblivion,” he is the anchor of reality in a sea of computer-generated effects. And he’s very good at that, as it turns out.

Just check out any of the YouTube supercuts of Cruise running. He’s fast and efficient, sure, but look at his face. His go-to facial expression is “holy Moses, this is terrifying.”

Early in his career, Cruise was known for his smile — the cocky, megawatt grin that seemed to explode across his jaw. In his recent action films, though, his face is more often a palate for grim determination: eyes wide, eyebrows raised in terror, jaw clenched as he leaps some enormous chasm or scrambles up some ledge. It’s all his way of saying to us, the audience: “Hey, pal. You and I aren’t so different. Heights are scary. Gusts of wind are inconvenient when landing in a parachute. We’re both going to be sore when we hit the side of this building. Oof!”

How odd that our shiniest celebrity, the man whose image once flashed most easily into our heads when we thought of the words “movie star,” a man who, throughout his career, has grappled with all sorts of questions of privacy and secrecy and image control and damage control, has somehow emerged at this late date as the movie world’s most unlikely symbol of old-fashioned authenticity.

He was a surprising candidate for this role. By the time the young Cruise pervaded our consciousness in “Risky Business” in 1983, he seemed already too famous, too swoon-inducing to even go to the shopping mall unmolested. By the time he was entangled with Kelly McGillis in “Top Gun” in 1986, he was on full celebrity-lockdown. He seemed to live entirely behind the golden gates of Hollywood. Go ahead, try to picture in your mind’s eye Tom Cruise in a normal environment of any kind, anywhere, doing anything normal. For that matter, try to imagine him not smiling.

So the fog of secrecy that has always surrounded him came to seem natural, even inevitable. He’s so weird, right? Remember that jumping on the couch? It seemed like he was being coached by a publicist on how to act like a human in love. Or have you heard that he may interview prospective wives in his living room? (Though how would you date if you were Tom Cruise? JDate?) Maybe he wears lifts. Maybe he has Xenu on speed dial. Though let me suggest that if we’re not insisting that Mel Gibson show up to award shows muzzled and restrained to a dolly, Hannibal Lecter-style, then perhaps we should just give Cruise some peace for his religious beliefs.

A note on that: Scientology isn’t among the world’s major religions, and when I picture what goes on behind closed doors, it is not unlike that most action-filled scene in “Eyes Wide Shut.” But Cruise isn’t a religious leader, just a religious man, so to me much of our criticism smacks of religious bigotry. I grew up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish household. Years of wide-eyed observation of people practicing a spirituality that made absolutely no sense to me led me to the conclusion that we’re all entitled to whatever magic we find that makes the world meaningful to us. I have no real proof that the Torah isn’t the “Dianetics” of millenniums past. (Don’t kill me, Mom.)

But back to Cruise: on-screen, running, shirtless, 50. Hanging off the side of a building. Seeming, weirdly, like the most authentic of all the big action stars. The scrappiest. The most underdoggiest. How?

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Or perhaps more pertinent: why? Why did he turn into an action star at all? He started out with the charismatic, instant success of “Risky Business,” “Top Gun” and “Cocktail.” He tiptoed into more serious fare with “Rain Man” and “Born on the Fourth of July.” Remember that deathbed scene in “Magnolia”? I can’t think of a more outstanding example in the parent’s-deathbed-scene subgenre. And yet, with each of his three Oscar nominations, there was a sense that he was achieving great things despite the hindrance of his handsomeness. “Can you believe that Tom Cruise was nominated?” Like he had to overcome a great handicap.

So maybe it makes perfect sense that he leapt into action films and thrillers, with the rare foray into something like “Lions for Lambs” or “Rock of Ages.” Finally, here was a genre where his good looks didn’t require explanation, were not presented as an impediment, where he didn’t have to worry about being too pretty for the position. (His height is another matter, as indicated by the grumbling that accompanied his playing the famously towering Jack Reacher.)

More than that, here was a genre in which he could outdo anyone. The aspect that sometimes seemed to dog his other acting — that famous Cruise intensity, that overwhelming desire to keep you entertained — actually becomes an asset in an action film. And for him, no stunt would be too big — or too small. He would be this thing with every fiber of his being. He would become the action hero.

By all accounts, he is the hardest-working megastar in the business. A man who seems to understand that for the ridiculous rate of compensation he receives, he’ll do anything that’s asked of him: the smallest talk show, the hardest stunt, the most intense run. Hard work equals success equals hard work in a loop forever. Authenticity equals value. These colors don’t run. Tom Cruise runs. You get my point.

And sure, not all of the films will be bull’s-eyes. But taken together, they prove we still need him. We need Tom Cruise!

Or at least, I need Tom Cruise. Good entertainment is getting harder to find. My TV is filled with cheaply made shows about demicelebrities whining at cameras as they vie for a man who is making out with all of them indiscriminately. People are decorating cakes on TV, and this is supposed to thrill us, to glue us to the screen. The most I can hope for from a comedy movie these days is that some jerk will stop smoking pot long enough to interest a sincere and beautiful woman. That jerk won’t run for you. That jerk won’t even get up from the couch for you.

And so I turn to Tom Cruise, who finds me worth taking the risk for, worth doing some situps for. Who’ll climb the side of the world’s tallest building for my pleasure. Run down that building, dangle off it, swing across from it. I work hard; I deserve it — I swear I do. If you do all that, I’ll forget everything, all the miscues of the past, and it will just about move me to tears, and I will be yours forever.

There’s another video available online of the making of that “Mission Impossible” Burj Khalifa sequence. It appears to be hand-held, cellphone camera footage of the filming of that scene, taken by someone in a crowd of onlookers below. No quick cuts and no overlaid soundtrack. Just people gathered to watch the spectacle.

Cruise is dangling from his safety harness outside the Burj Khalifa, placing those gloved hands at the outer windows of the building. He bounces and pushes off the building in what appears to be an intense negotiation with the building and the stunt itself. He looks down briefly and notices the crowd. He diverts his pinpoint focus just for a second. He seems to make eye contact with the person holding the cellphone that’s recording the footage. And he smiles the whitest, most winning smile you can imagine (or don’t have to imagine — you know it very well). Then he removes a hand from the building and waves, our movie star in chief, greeting the constituents who expect him to fulfill the office to which he was elected.

A second later, he pushes off from the building, flying off the window’s surface, rounding the corner of that huge edifice — whoosh! — until he is gone beyond the camera’s view.

A version of this article appears in print on April 21, 2013, on Page MM46 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: More Jumping Out of Buildings,Less Jumping on Sofas. Today's Paper|Subscribe